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He’s watching Star Trek again, that episode
where Einstein,
Newton, and Hawking play poker with Data. He’s
eating
a tomato, lets its sweet flesh compress between
his teeth,
squirt juice down his stubble. But zoom in a couple
orders of magnitude and there is no tomato, no
he, just
space and atoms. You have to dive deep into the
nucleus
to find any charm at all. It’s all related,
generally
speaking, space and tomatoes and twenty-five years;
only the weak force of gravity keeping them together.
If time travel were possible, would she take
it all back
to the evening he proposed? There was no tomato
then,
no Data. On days she thinks time runs thixotropic
like ketchup in the bottle she needs to shake
up,
she knows it’s more: the way shifting a
single electron
from an atom of friable metal to an atom of poisonous
gas
creates the sodium chloride without which they
would die.
Like salt, they can’t exist alone. To split
them up
would take more energy than the universe can spare.
Pat Valdata is an adjunct associate professor for
the University of
Maryland University College and a correspondent
for Diverse Issues in
Higher Education. Her publications include the novel
Crosswind (Wind
Canyon Publishing) and the poetry chapbook Looking
for Bivalve (Pecan Grove Press). She lives in Elkton,
Maryland, in the United States.
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Poem: Real Blue
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